Rosalind Franklin

Photograph 51 was not stolen, and that matters more than it seems. The exposure was made in May 1952 by her doctoral student Raymond Gosling. When Franklin moved to Birkbeck, Randall insisted the DNA work stay at King's, and Gosling handed copies to Maurice Wilkins. In January 1953 Wilkins showed the photograph to Watson—holding the copy legitimately and without Franklin's permission to show it. Separately and no less importantly: Max Perutz gave Crick the December 1952 report of the Medical Research Council's biophysics committee containing her crystallographic data, including the C2 space group from which Crick understood that the chains run antiparallel. No theft, no burglary, no deceit—a chain of institutional carelessness and male collegiality that excluded her. Put that way it is both more damning and more accurate.

She herself was agnostic: as a child she asked "how do you know He isn't She?", and in 1940 she wrote to her father that she did not accept his definition of faith as belief in life after death, and saw no reason a creator would be concerned with "our insignificant race". But she kept the belonging: at her grandfather's request she joined the Cambridge Jewish Society, and told her sister she had always been consciously a Jew. Zionism may not be attributed to her—her father was an active anti-Zionist.

And one thing about the prize: "she was robbed of the Nobel" is not a misjudgement but a category error. She died on 16 April 1958, at thirty-seven, the DNA prize was awarded in 1962, and it is not given posthumously.